


sweeter somethings

by lateralplosion



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29135949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralplosion/pseuds/lateralplosion
Summary: You wonder if he knows how precisely he cuts, how your thoughts and heart always seem to be laid bare to him. Jeonghan only has to take one look at you to know what you need.
Relationships: Lee Seokmin | DK/Yoon Jeonghan
Comments: 16
Kudos: 36
Collections: DK's Birthday Bash!





	sweeter somethings

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday to our brightest star, lee seokmin!! and a thousand kisses to dia for organizing this fest ♡ thank you for letting me participate~

When you are seven, your neighbor's son challenges you to a contest to see who could look the longest at the sun.

You remember squinting upwards at the blazing ball of light, trying furiously not to blink even as the sharp burn of the sun's rays make your eyes water. Your vision begins to filter blurry and overexposed, and the boy next to you wrenches his eyes away with a choked gasp, but you keep on staring—mesmerized by the slow heat of the star that keeps the world going, bright and dazzling and suddenly so very much.

Tears slip out from under your lashes when you finally close your eyes.

You try to open then again, and find that you can't.

_Photokeratitis_ , the doctor tells you. _Inflammation caused by overexposure to the sun_.

Your mother gives you a piercing look, but you can't be bothered to feel ashamed. Your eyes feel hot and watery, and the overhead lamp is painful. It reminds you, somehow, of swimming in the pool for too long without goggles, with the way the whites in the room go hazy and shimmering.

The doctor prescribes you eyedrops. _It should go away in 48 hours_ , he says.

For two days, you wander around at home, restless and cooped up. Your eyes are still sensitive, so you can't go outside. But occasionally you see slivers of sunlight peeking through the blinds in your bedroom, and you wonder how something so beautiful could be so hard to look at.

You continue to wonder until you are sixteen and meet Yoon Jeonghan.

And, suddenly, the sun seems so painfully dim.

Like most things, the first time is by chance.

You remember this clearly, standing in that hotel hallway in Osaka, fresh from the airport and weary down to your bones. You're all exhausted, but you also remember the excitement—slow to form underneath your skin, like a bruise. Your manager is rattling off names, pairing you all into duos, and you're so caught up in the moment that you almost miss when he calls you. It's not until you feel the arm looping through yours, that you turn and see him standing there close to you, smiling with all of his teeth.

"You and me then," Jeonghan says, eyes crescenting, and your heart swells to twice its size. There's a feeling for this, you know, but it doesn't have a name. Not yet, anyway. But that's okay, because it will.

The second time, Jeonghan chooses you. You're in Singapore this time, and you remember the grip of his hands on your shoulders, solid and assured. "I want to room with Dokyeommie," he announces, with such a definite certainty that even your managers look taken aback. "He and I match well."

You have no reason to protest, because this is Jeonghan, whose mere presence has done more for your nerves than most other things. You let him drag you to your room.

He makes room for himself then, spread out amongst all his things. Jeonghan looks up at you from his spot on the floor, leaning back with all the casual ease of someone who can see you down to your bones. You wish that it could always be this easy, that you could look at Jeonghan for more than five seconds at a time. You wonder if he knows how precisely he cuts, how your thoughts and heart always seem to be laid bare to him. Jeonghan only has to take one look at you to know what you need. And you wonder if he knows—in that the languid curl of his mouth, the quiet and self-assured glint in his eyes—just how badly you want to kiss him.

Jeonghan catches you once in the middle of the night, leaning halfway out the dorm window with your entire body craned around to look upwards.

"What are you doing?" he asks you. When you look at him, you can tell that he hasn't been sleeping. But Jeonghan doesn't talk about this. Not to you, at least.

"Thirsty," you tell him, holding up your water glass. Your face is warm from being caught, but you don't want to say what you were really doing. You don't think you could explain, anyway, how the night sky is so much more comforting, precisely because there is no sun to turn away from. Out there, the stars are kind. The moon is even kinder.

Jeonghan's lips quirk up at the corners, but he doesn't press. "One of these days you're going to fall out that window, and then we'll have to find a new power voice."

There it is again: the blithe ease that always makes Jeonghan so hard to read. The silence that follows feels odd and fragile. It's unfamiliar to you, who'd always lacked the delicacy to deal with things like this. The kitchen is dark, bathed only in the light spilling in from the hallway, but that light gets in Jeonghan's hair and illuminates him in ways you've only seen in your dreams. It makes a foothold in your ribcage, puts your heart on wings, but before you can say anything else, Jeonghan is turning away and switching off the light.

"Go to sleep soon," he tells you, and you know that there's so much more underneath. You don't know how to pan through the grit, to sift through the layers and pull up those gleaming little nuggets of truth. The truth that—in Jeonghan—there is so much that paralyzes you, but you can't quite figure out why.

People have asked you—if you had a choice, would you do it all over again?

You think about the years you spent trying to cobble together something that works, the way they melted you down and reduced you to a singular selling point. You are DK, you are a singer. Your voice is the most important thing, it is essential. You think about the way that revelation rocked you to your core, rebuilt your identity, put yourself together in ways you could barely recognize. You'd wondered if the Romans went through something similar, when Copernicus asserted that the Earth revolved around the sun. You consider the others, the way you might never know what kind of people they used to be, before the same thing happened to them. You think about Jeonghan, who's held you all up more times than you'd all collectively admit.

You consider this, and your answer is always the same.

It's your opening night, and you feel like you're sixteen again, about to go out on stage for the first time. When you look out from your place in the wings, you can see him sitting four rows from the front, flanked by Jisoo and Minghao on either side.

He can't see you. He's looking down at his program, eyebrows furrowed and expression distant, so he can't see the way you're holding yourself together by the elbows. You remember how this goes. The nerves, the temporary disbelief of that moment. Jeonghan had been there that first time too, but at least then he'd been by your side and not fifty feet away where you couldn't reach him.

You don't have time to dwell. The stage manager presses her hand to your arm, and you're up. This is where you stop thinking. You are not sixteen anymore. You are more than just a voice on the stage. You are the brightest star in the sky.

You’ve never seen Jeonghan cry. You know that he must, have heard the stories secondhand from Jisoo or Seungcheol. But always peripheral. You've never seen it yourself.

You’ve witnessed his voice cracking. You’ve heard his words struggle around a lump in his throat. Once or twice, you’ve seen his eyes well up.

But—to you—Jeonghan has always seemed a special kind of indestructible. An untouchable force made up entirely of warm hands and skin and bone. And even through a friendship years in the making, he’s never cried in front of you once.

But he's crying now, winding a hand into the hair at the nape of your neck. He's pulling you forward, and words fail you, then.

He's trying to tell you something between gasps, and you think it's something like _I'm proud of you, you were so good, Seokmin-ah, you were so beautiful up there_ , but you only get it in bits and pieces.

That's okay. Jeonghan has always known how to tell you what matters. The things that sometimes cannot be put into words. 

You wrap your arms around his shoulders and revel in the high. The exhilaration, the conquest of the stage. His heart is a ringing gong against your chest, and you tell yourself, _this is important. This is essential._

Even still, there are things that you just don't talk about, those quieter moments of doubt that haunt you at your weakest. You dream, sometimes, that you are reaching out in a void, desperate for any sort of connection. You want this so badly that it turns the back of your tongue bitter and metallic. You stretch, you reach, but there is no one.

You wake up, and you don't tell anyone.

It's always worse when you can't see it coming, when it sneaks up on you unexpectedly. The evening started off fine. You'd had a beer with Chan, toasted to Minghao and Jihoon's birthday with the rest of them, participated in the games. You were comfortable, you were happy.

The thing is, you know it's more common after you drink, so you watch yourself. You think you're being careful, but the alcohol takes it time to creep its way back up your throat. One moment you're fine, and the next moment you're hunched over in front of the bathroom mirror, biting down on the inside of your cheek. It's then you feel like you're sixteen again, shivering and nauseous and trying to choke back the horrible feeling rising high inside your chest.

Outside the door, the others carry on like nothing had happened. They're expecting you out any second now, but you don't know how to choke this down. You don't know how to go back out there in front of the cameras and act like you hadn't been ten seconds away from upending your insides. Maybe that's what they all expect of you. Maybe that's the problem.

You heart a burst of laughter from the other side of the door. Another wave of queasiness suffuses through your body, and you clench your jaw, willing for it all to go away.

In the end, Jeonghan is the one to find you, flushed and dizzy and sweating through your shirt, clutching loosely at the sink and trying not to puke. You had excused yourself to the bathroom a little while ago, and the others were probably starting to worry.

He doesn't say anything, for which you are grateful. Silence, you have learned, has become somewhat of a gift with Jeonghan. Jeonghan has always known when to say the right words, when to say nothing at all.

Instead, he stands there and waits for you to steady yourself, for you to take long, sucking breaths of air and lose the tension in your shoulders. For someone who usually has to much to say, this is one of the things about Jeonghan that you appreciate the most—his patience.

"Drink too much?" he asks, finally. His voice is the first sound you've heard in the past ten minutes aside from your own heaving. It is not unwelcome.

You note wordlessly, staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror.

His laughter bounces off the walls. "Me too, Dokyeom-ah, me too."

You're grateful for this. You've had so many years of trying to get this down right, all that training and mental preparation to craft an image that you could sell, and after all of that you're locked up in a bathroom alone. Jeonghan understands. Seungkwan is a talker, Mingyu's a chatterbox, and Soonyoung sometimes doesn't pay enough attention.

But Jeonghan—Jeonghan's a listener. He can listen for hours while people go on and on about themselves. You remember how it was before, when others called you weak-willed and a pushover, simply because you let them talk your ears off and bombard you with their problems. You know better now, that listening is a strength. It's no one's fault if there are lapses in the conversation. And it's no one's responsibility to have all the answers.

You remember several times like those—times when all thirteen of you are piled into the 6th floor living room and Mingyu's pointing fingers and Seungcheol's temper is simmering on a low boil and you're feeling like you're about to cry. And that's when Jeonghan will speak up.

"Let's table this for tonight," he'll say, and he won't say your name, but you'll know when he looks at you that he's concerned. "Maybe we should sleep first."

You'll look back at him then, at his carefully composed expression and the determined set in his jaw, and it's in that moment that you'll realize you're in love with him.

But you hadn't known any of that yet. All you know is that in five minutes you'll go out there again and be Seventeen's Dokyeom for the camera ("This isn't a broadcast," Seungkwan insists, but you'll all angle yourselves for the best camera shot anyway).

There's a hand at your shoulder, squeezing, comforting. "Do you feel better now?"

How hard is it to stare into the sun? Maybe it looks back at you sometimes.

You straighten up. "I think so."

Jeonghan's answering smile is warm and inviting. "Let's go."

And so you go.

It doesn't take long for you to get back into the groove of things. You share another beer with Jisoo. You sing a song with Seungkwan. You try to do a sexy dance, but you're drunk and fall over on the couch. They all get a laugh out of that one, Jeonghan especially.

You remember the heavy weight of your feet, a hand curled around your shoulder—grounding, anchoring him down. You remember lying down—though this isn't your room, the one you picked with Jeonghan—and the comforting weight of a blanket drawn up around your shoulders.

You remember voices, far away and distant until suddenly they're not, and then you remember Jeonghan's voice, closer this time. There are hands in your hair, and they’re gentle.

"Seokmin-ah," he's telling you. You think he's whispering, petting your hair back, but you can't be sure. You are so, so sleepy. "Seokmin-ah, do you know how precious you are?"

You remember waking up later with Seungcheol's singing in your ears, the previous night sticking to you like cobweb strands. It doesn't take much to get you up and going. You hear Jeonghan's voice join in with yours, and you sit up. You catch his eye, and you share a smile.

People have asked you—would you do this all over again? Against all odds, would you stand tall, face forwards? Would you look up at the sky and stare directly into the sun?

Your answer is always the same.

It is always yes.

**Author's Note:**

> I LOVE U DEEKAY...... pls be sure to check out the other dkdayfest works [here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/dkbirthdaybash)!
> 
> (also if you liked this i would rly appreciate a comment T vT♡)
> 
> [twt](http://twitter.com/plosionlateral) | [cc](http://curiouscat.me/wayschanged)


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